What can you get for $0.05 a day: Microsoft Office Professional

Microsoft recently announced a new option for their Office 365 product. In addition to Office 365 Home Premium (to be renamed Home) which offers up to 5 installations of Office Professional. A new option, Office 365 Personal will become available this Spring. Personal will allow you to install Office Professional on one PC + one tablet. My guess is this will basically mean 2 computers, as all Microsoft Office software has always permitted. Keep in mind, this isn’t the Office that most home computers grew up with. This is the big daddy of Microsoft Office, including; Word, Excel, Power Point, One Note, Outlook, Publisher & Access. And all for as little as $0.05 per day/per machine with the Home option, or $0.10, per day/per machine for the Personal option. For those of you that have a little problem with math, the charts below might help:

Our own Professor Smyth questioned, in internal emails, what makes this any different than Office Web Apps? I’ll answer that with another question Prof, what makes a Chromebook any different than a Windows 8 Laptop? Note to all, Office 365 Home/Personal is NOT a web tool. It is a subscription version of Microsoft Office that downloads the complete Office Professional Suite to your Windows PC or Mac (Publisher & Access not available for Macs). After installation, no Internet connection required. In addition to having full, unhindered access to the Office Suite of apps, there are a few extras. For starters, you get 60 minutes of Skype calling per month. Next, you get 20GB of additional storage for your OneDrive account. And with Office On Demand, you can stream an Office app to any computer anywhere. For Office 365 Home, you can designate up to 4 other users on your account. Each of those users gain an additional 20GB of OneDrive storage and can manager their own installs with a separate login to Office 365. And did I mention, with your Office 365 Home account (not sure about Personal) you can install Office on up to 5 Android or iDevices.

Yes, Office 365 Home/Personal is a subscription service. Meaning that you will need to keep the subscription active to use Office. It did hurt a little when my subscription renewed last week for $99.99. But then I thought about all the times I made use of Office 2013 installed on my four machines this past year. Not having to worry which machine had which version of OneNote, or Publisher, or whatever, installed. All machines, up to date with the latest version of Office all the time. Nothing to manage. No discs to lose. No 25 character keys to enter. Gives me that peaceful. easy feeling. You know what I mean?

Office Home & Student, which doesn’t include Outlook, Publisher or Access is $139.99 for a single license. Adding one of the missing Office apps will set you back $92. Almost the cost of a full Office 365 Home subscription for a year. Office Professional (single license) is $399.99. If you, or your family, or your extended family, uses more than one computer, then Office 365 is an economical option for you.